This week’s story is from The Baum Plan for Financial Independence by John Kessel, published by Small Beer Press. A long-awaited collection of fourteen stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor. Kessel, whose story “A Clean Escape” was filmed as part of ABC’s Masters of Science Fiction, ranges through genres with a lean, graceful style that incorporates everything from future autobiography, alternate history, phone sex, perpetual motion, and his modern classic sequence of four stories about life on the moon. “Pride and Prometheus,” a story involving characters from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was the winner of the 2008 Nebula award for Best Novelette.